Page 30 of These Immortal Truths
“What have you done?” Anna pulls away from his hold, eyes searching for the familiar and finding nothing but sky and fields. “How are we here?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes!” The word rolls over the flowered stalks, softening the edges when she wishes it would remain as sharp as the dagger in her heart feels. “You could have done this forher. You could have savedher.”
“She isn’t my responsibility.Youare.”
“I didn’t need saving! I can’t die!”
His expression twists, teeth bared and frustration coating his voice in gravel. “You still think like a mortal. As if there is life and death, and nothing else. I admire your heart, Anna, but there are limits to how much of it you can afford to give away before you break.”
The words leave her as a sob breaks away from her chest. “They areburning her!”
“Her fate is not my doing.”
“But your refusal to helpis!” Her hands gesture wildly, anything to have an outlet for the anger burning beneath her skin.
“Be angry if you wish, Anna, but your judgment is meaningless.”
She seethes. “Why? Because I’m human?”
“Because you’re ignorant,” he snaps, the bite in his words matching her own. “You have no understanding of what you’re asking.”
“And you’re a coward!”
He goes impossibly still, danger coiling around him like a snake the moment before they strike. “A coward?”
Anna pales, a tremble dancing up her spine. The air between them is thick with a power even she can feel humming against her skin. It steals her breath, smothers whatever is left of her anger. She has never feared him, even when she first discovered he was more than human, Khiran has never done anything to make her feel afraid. She is now. The fury in his eyes is raw and deep—consuming. She’s drowning in it.
His chest heaves around ragged breaths as he steps closer—towering over her tiny frame. “I have spent a millennia whispering in mortal ears, singing songs and weaving stories with only glimmers of truth to tie them together. I am Loki, the god of Lies. Eris, the goddess of strife. Lucifer, Wisakedjak, Eshu, Anansi, Hanuman. I am all of them, and I am none of them.” He leans closer until their foreheads nearly touch and she can feel his words against her lips with every violent tremble. “You stand there, with your mere centuries, and dare to place blame when you knownothingof the powerholding the strings of your world and the consequences that come with toying with lives that aren’t ours to play with.”
He pulls away, just a few inches. Just enough for his gaze to trace the quiver of her bottom lip. The stifling heaviness weighing over her eases with the tension in his shoulders, melting away like wax held too close to the fire. When he speaks, his voice is softer. More like the man she’s known for centuries and less like the powerful god she had foolishly forgotten him to be. “You haven’t learned yet, Anna, but you will. It’s only a matter of when, not if, and I shall hold on to patience with everything I am. Because asinfuriatingas your ignorance is, there is only so long you can hold on to it.”
Anna doesn’t answer. Even if she could find the courage, she doesn’t know what to say. She feels his sigh before he breaks eye contact and takes a generous step back.
“We’re in central France, well away from the fighting. Stay if you wish, or continue south to Aragon.”
She licks her lips, hands grasping at the fabric of her skirt to help quell their trembling. “You won’t take me back to Rouen?”
The short breath of laughter he gives is heavy with disappointment. Chastising. “So you can suffer over things you can’t change?” He shakes his head. “No, Anna. I won’t bring you back. It’s time for you to move on.”
She wants to argue, to defend her reasons for wishing to return. He doesn’t give her the chance. Just as her lips part around his name, he disappears; blinking out of her life with the same effortless magic that brought him into it.
It’s five years before she sees him again.
Five years of second guessing and replaying the words they exchanged until they are as committed to memory as her own name.
She hasn’t moved from the French countryside. Anna tells herself it’s because she’s tired, but part of her has held onto the hope thatstaying would mean him coming back sooner. Armies pass through often, soldiers going north in all their uniformed splendor and returning bloodied and beaten with ghosts haunting their eyes. It seems like they’ve been battling the English for lifetimes. She doesn’t see an end in sight.
The first soldier she offers help to is delirious with fever, stumbling and swaying against his comrades in arms. Some of the men sneer, others laugh. Most of them believe the only place a woman has healing is the birthing bed, but there’s a desperate sheen in the feverish soldier’s eyes. Anna knows he won’t last much longer without treatment.
He knows it, too.
There’s not a city for miles, no men of medicine, and eventually they seem to realize that doing nothing is sure to spell death. Anna brings him herbs to reduce the fever, instructs one of the more kind-faced soldiers (a child, he’s only a child) to fetch water and build a fire to boil it. The wound on her patient’s shoulder is superficial, a cut along his upper arm, but it’s riddled with infection that he’s ignored instead of treated.
She makes a poultice, brews a tea. By morning his fever has cooled, only a hair’s breath away from normal. Anna sends him off with extra supplies and strict instructions. When he asks how much, the words she gives are an echo from lifetimes ago.
“Give what you can.”
